💥 The Cost of Money Is Changing Everything

July was the worst month since 2008 for tech stocks. Plus, what falling homeownership and fertility mean for America’s future.

Jesse Livermore made his first fortune betting against the market in the Panic of 1907 and made $100 million shorting the crash of 1929. That’s like $2 billion today. He became one of the most famous traders in America.

His success gave him access to anything money could buy. It did not give him control over the part of himself that kept changing his plan. He could be right about the market and still lose because he borrowed too much, increased the risk, or abandoned the rule that made the original trade sound.

By 1934, he was bankrupt.

Livermore understood the rule he kept breaking. When I read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, one lesson stayed with me: the money was made not in the thinking, but in the sitting. Finding a sound trade is one skill. Staying patient enough to let it work is another.

The man who is remembered for teaching us to sit still destroyed himself by abandoning his own rules. How ironic.

But that distinction matters. Patience is not doing nothing. It is continuing to follow a sound plan while the market gives you reasons to doubt it, speed it up, or replace it with a more exciting one.

I think about this every time a month like July arrives. Semiconductor stocks suffered their worst month since 2008. Then one warning from Samsung about memory shortages sent Micron up 18% and Sandisk up 26% in a day. Anyone who panicked on the way down and anyone who chased on the way up made the same mistake at opposite prices.

The long-term information did not change as quickly as the prices did. People’s patience did.

July showed why patience matters more when money is expensive. A mortgage that needs lower rates to become affordable is a bad plan. A company valued on profits years away has less room for error when long-term Treasuries yield more than 5%. An investor who keeps cash and follows a schedule can wait. Someone stretched by debt, a fragile budget, or an oversized position may be forced to act at the worst time.

That is the connection running through the entire issue. The cost of money changes the price of waiting. It changes which companies can fund growth, it changes which households can absorb a mortgage, and it changes which investors have enough room to remain patient when prices move against them.

This issue is about those choices: what expensive money is doing to markets, housing, wages, and family formation—and how to build a plan that does not need luck to arrive on schedule.

📬 Here’s what’s in this issue:

Part I — Big Picture (What You Need To Know)

(1) Market & Economy Breakdown

(2) 5 Things You Need To Learn

Part II — What The Market Is Telling Us

(3) Market Psychology, Signals, and What’s Next

(4) Interest Rates & Real Estate

Part III — Investment Research & Analysis

(5) Insider Trading Alerts

(6) My Stock Picks & Research

(7) The Smartest Trades I See Right Now

Part IV — Financial Playbook (What To Do)

(8) A Valuable Lesson (People Learn Too Late)

(9) My Tips & Actionable Advice

(10) You Asked, I Answered

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Part I: Big Picture (What You Need To Know)

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(1) Market & Economy Breakdown (And What It Means For You)

What happened, why it matters, and what’s next.

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Markets

1. July was the worst month for tech stocks since 2008. The Nasdaq fell 3.2% and the Nasdaq-100 lost 6.6%, putting it in a correction (meaning a drop of at least 10% from a recent high.)

   1. The damage was concentrated. The iShares Semiconductor ETF fell 22.1%, its worst month since 2002, while the S&P 500 stayed near its highs.

2. Microsoft surged 16% after earnings, adding $450 billion of market value in a day, the largest one-day gain by any US company ever. Azure cloud revenue passed $100 billion for the year, up 41%.

3. Amazon jumped 15% after Amazon Web Services grew 37%, its fastest pace in 18 quarters, even as it raised 2026 capital spending to $220 billion.

Economy

4. The Fed held rates at 3.5% to 3.75%, but three officials dissented in favor of a hike, and markets now treat a September increase as more likely than not.

5. The 30-year Treasury yield ended July at 5.27%, its highest level since 2007. The 10-year hit 4.7%, the highest since January 2025.

6. Brent crude topped $100 a barrel for the first time since May after Houthi attacks on two Saudi tankers. US national debt hit a record $39.7 trillion.

Housing

7. Mortgage rates rose to 6.66% per Freddie Mac, the highest in nearly a year, and Mortgage News Daily’s lender survey already shows 6.85%.

8. The median existing-home price hit a record $440,600 per the NAR, while median new-home prices fell below resale prices for the first time ever, per Bloomberg. Homeownership among people under 35 fell to 35.2%, the only age group with a significant decline.

What This Means for You

I kept DCA’ing (dollar cost averaging) into my index funds ($VGT to play on tech) straight through the worst month for chip stocks since 2008. This drop was just short term noise. Long term wealth is built on red days like this. Red days are a gift for long-term investors. I kept buying.

Here is why. July was not investors losing faith in AI. It was investors repricing it. When the 30-year Treasury pays 5.27%, every dollar of profit a company promises for 2030 is worth less today than when safe money paid nothing, because now you can take the 5.27% and wait. That math hits the companies with the most distant payoffs hardest. The technology didn’t change last month. The discount rate did.

Earnings week showed the same thing. Microsoft and Amazon are proving that their spending is paying off, and they were rewarded with the two best days of the season. Meta and Alphabet asked investors to keep waiting and were punished, even though both businesses grew. Same industry, same buildout, opposite treatment. The difference was how far away the payoff sits.

You need to show profits. Money talks, bullshit walks. After 20+ years in finance, my standard is simple. A company can spend heavily when the business can show where the money is going and how the investment can earn a return. A large AI budget by itself is no longer enough.

That standard is also the strategy. Own the proven winners. Own the proven earners. Own the companies selling picks and shovels. The chipmakers, the equipment makers, and the electricians wiring the data centers get paid no matter which AI company wins. That last group is where a lot of this issue’s research lands.

Since I am asking you to act on my judgment, here are two of my calls from last issue. I said mortgage rates would hold near 6.5%, and that if the war escalated, 7% was back on the table. The war escalated, and rates hit 6.66% with lenders quoting 6.85%. Not 7% yet, but the direction and the reason were right. I also said my plan for SK Hynix was to buy weakness, never strength. Days later, $1 trillion left the chip trade. I bought some on the drop.

All of this rewards one group: the people who already own the assets getting repriced. Jamie Dimon said this week that America has left lower-income workers behind. The bottom 50% own just 2.5% of America’s wealth. Since when did the American Dream mean half the country splitting 2.5% of the pie? Expensive money pays whoever already owns things and charges everyone else.

And here is what would change my mind. I’d be bearish if there was a market-wide correction across the S&P 500. So far this is a tech correction inside a market that is holding up, with the S&P 500 closing Friday at 7,490, still above the key floor at 7,313. If the selling spreads, the story changes, and I will tell you.

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(2) 5 Things You Need To Learn

The biggest ideas & trends to pay attention to.

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📬 Today we analyze:

1) The Fed Will Have to Raise Rates Again

2) War, Record Debt, and Stocks Near Highs

3) Wall Street Banks Just Published Their Buy Lists

4) AI’s First Labor-Market Effect Is Smaller Raises

5) America’s Population Will Begin Shrinking in the 2050s

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But first — When do mortgage rates drop below 5%?

The Fed Will Have to Raise Rates Again

I think the Fed hikes rates soon. I feel it. More and more officials will start to dissent each meeting.

I never believe anything they say anyway. Don’t forget, this is the same Fed that told us inflation was “transitory.”

Here’s what happened this week. The Federal Reserve held its target rate at 3.5% to 3.75%, which is the headline everyone saw, but the vote underneath it was the real news. Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari, and Lorie Logan all voted to raise rates instead, and that’s the first time since 2016 that three members have broken the same direction. Not one member voted for a cut. When you remember that inflation has now run above the Fed’s 2% target for five straight years, three people saying enough is enough starts to look less like a protest and more like the beginning of a majority.

Chairman Kevin Warsh didn’t hide it either. He told reporters he had asked for a good family fight and gotten one, and he pushed back on anyone calling the hold a pause. The bond market heard that clearly. For the rest of the week, futures priced a September hike at anywhere from a coin flip to better than 75%, depending on the day you looked.

There’s one number that argues for patience, and it’s weaker than it looks. Thursday’s PCE report dipped 0.1% in June, the first monthly decline since 2020, which sounds like inflation finally cracking. But that dip came from oil prices falling during June’s brief truce, and that truce is over. Brent is back above $100. So the one piece of good news we got was manufactured by a peace that no longer exists.

If the hike lands, you’ll feel it in specific places rather than all at once. Mortgages, credit cards, and auto loans stay expensive or get worse. Savings accounts pay you a little more. And stocks priced on far-off profits fall the hardest, which is exactly what July was already doing before the Fed said a word. That last part matters, because it means the market has started front-running the Fed instead of waiting on it.

War, Record Debt, and Stocks Near Highs

The cheap money era is gone unless another black swan event happens. And who knows when that will be. People need to stop clinging on to 2 and 3% mortgages happening anytime soon.

Which brings up the question that I keep getting. If the world has a war, $100 oil, and record government debt, why are stocks anywhere near record highs? A new Moody’s report takes that question seriously, and chief credit officer Atsi Sheth gives an answer I think is right: the market already adjusted. You just have to look under the index to see it.

Think about what the old era actually was. From the 2008 crisis through the pandemic, inflation ran below target, governments borrowed almost for free, and rates near zero pushed everybody into high-growth tech and risky debt because there was nowhere else to earn anything. That world is over. The new one runs on geopolitical conflict, heavy deficits, aging populations, and security spending, and all of that means structurally higher inflation and higher borrowing costs. The 30-year Treasury has now traded above 5% for its longest stretch since the financial crisis.

So the adjustment is happening inside the market instead of on its surface. Money rotated out of software, autos, and consumer stocks, which are exactly the businesses that get hurt when capital is expensive and households are stretched. It rotated into energy, hardware, and semiconductors. Look at July through that lens and it stops being a market breaking down. It’s the new regime collecting its toll from companies that still spend like money is free.

Moody's is honest about what could go wrong, and I'd underline both risks. The AI spending may not pay off. And plenty of investors still assume that if things get bad enough, governments will step in the way they always have, which is a hope, not a plan. My takeaway is simpler than any of that. Stop using the 2010s playbook to judge a 2026 market, because that trillion dollars leaving the chip stocks wasn't an accident. It was this era doing exactly what it does.

Wall Street Banks Just Published Their Buy Lists

Every big research house published a shopping list within days of the chip selloff, which tells you they were all thinking the same thing.

UBS, Morgan Stanley, and HSBC agree on the headline: this looks like a correction inside the AI boom, not the end of it. Where they differ is in the details. UBS thinks the next winners come from outside the handful of mega-caps that led the first leg. Morgan Stanley calls the pullback a buying opportunity and spreads its ideas across AI infrastructure, the compute chain, energy-security names, and the hyperscalers. HSBC went further than either and moved to maximum overweight on stocks.

One name on Morgan Stanley’s list surprised me, and not in a good way. SpaceX. Last issue I warned that its lockup expires in August and the supply of tradable shares could roughly quadruple. That month is here now, and a spot on a bank’s buy list doesn’t change the math of supply. The stock is already down 41% from its high. I’d let the lockup flood pass before I touched it.

Here’s the thing about all these notes, though. The useful part isn’t the tickers, it’s the agreement. These firms disagree about which vehicle wins and agree the buildout keeps going, which is a much easier thing to bet on. You don’t have to guess better than Morgan Stanley. Own the broad market through something like $VOO or $VTI, add the picks-and-shovels layer through a semiconductor fund like $SMH or $SOXX, and you capture the same trend without staking your savings on any one name from any one list. That’s the whole reason I keep saying it: with an index fund, you don’t have to guess.

AI’s First Labor-Market Effect Is Smaller Raises

I see this one up close frequently. Every week I get a few of these DMs. Followers terrified about AI taking their jobs, about not being able to afford rent or the mortgage, about being able to take care of their families. And when I posted this week that a 32-hour, 4-day workweek with no cut in pay would improve millions of lives, the replies made one thing clear. Almost everyone wants a 4-day workweek.

This week the data caught up with those DMs, and it says something different from what everyone fears. A new white paper from Apollo Global Management finds that AI’s first cost is landing on paychecks, not on jobs. Economists Sania Edlich and Torsten Slok studied 321 matched occupations using wage data and Anthropic’s measure of AI exposure, and the workers in the most exposed jobs, people like programmers, customer-service reps, and financial analysts, saw real wage growth 6.7 percentage points lower than everyone else after 2023. Apollo puts the total at $28 billion a year in pay that never showed up, spread across roughly 5.8 million workers, with the bottom of the income ladder hit hardest. You keep the job and lose the raise.

I’d hold that finding loosely, because the paper doesn’t settle anything on its own. The exposure measure comes from Anthropic, it covers 11 highly exposed occupations, and slower wage growth can come from plenty of things besides AI. But it still matters, and here’s why. A company doesn’t have to lay anyone off to capture the gains from a new technology. It can simply keep the same people and stop giving raises, and almost nobody notices that happening to them until years have passed.

Especially important since this squeeze is landing on top of a much older one. In 1990, a $100,000 salary had the buying power of about $255,000 today. Today, $100,000 buys what roughly $39,000 bought in 1990. So a generation that already lost ground to inflation is now losing ground to a technology, and the paycheck that used to be the whole plan keeps buying less every year it exists.

America’s Population Will Begin Shrinking in the 2050s

2050 is so close. It’s almost here.

That’s the part of this week’s population report that stuck with me. A new study from the Institute for Family Studies argues the US population will stop growing in the 2030s, peak somewhere near 351 million, and start shrinking in the 2050s. The official forecasts from the Census Bureau, the UN, and the Social Security trustees put that decline off until the 2080s or later, so this is a gap of fifty years between the government’s math and this one.

The disagreement comes down to two assumptions. First, the official models bake in roughly 1 million to 1.2 million net immigrants every single year through 2100, which this report calls implausible, and they assume fertility eventually recovers. It hasn’t. Second, the US fertility rate has fallen below 1.6 children per woman, a record low, against the 2.1 you need just to hold a population steady.

Now if that math is right, a lot of things a whole generation assumed about their future stop being automatic. Fewer workers per retiree puts real strain on Social Security and Medicare. A shrinking labor force slows growth and innovation. And the housing math everyone grew up with, the idea that demand always rises because there are always more people, stops working the way it did.

My audience is already living this. A few subscribers have complained to me how bad dating is, and the rest about how unaffordable things have become. I posted the numbers behind that feeling this week. In 1950, 50% of Americans were married homeowners by age 30. In 2026, it’s 12%. Crazy numbers. An entire generation is realizing that a home and family may never be within reach.

A country where forming a family costs this much shouldn’t act surprised when it gets fewer families. You can’t fix demographics from your kitchen table, but you can plan around them. Assume Social Security replaces less of your income than it did for your parents, and let assets you actually own fund your later decades instead.

What Ties These Together

Look at these five together and they’re really two forces meeting. The Fed’s split vote and the Moody’s era shift are the same story told from two rooms: money costs more now, permanently as far as anyone can see, and Wall Street’s buy lists are professional investors repositioning for exactly that. Then the last two stories show you what that same force does once it reaches a household. Slower raises today because a technology is capturing the gains, and fewer households tomorrow because building a life costs more than a paycheck can carry.

That same force runs straight through the market breakdown I walked you through earlier. That rotation moved money toward proven earners and the companies selling picks and shovels, and every dollar of it landed with someone who already owned assets. Expensive money always pays owners first and charges everybody else. It's why Jamie Dimon's number stings, and it's why the answer keeps being the same one: turn your income into ownership on a schedule, so the force reshaping this decade is working for you instead of on you.

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Part II: What the Market Is Telling Us

3. Market Psychology, Signals, and What’s Next

4. Interest Rate Forecast & Real Estate Outlook

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(3) Market Psychology, Signals, and What’s Next

The psychology, signals, and data pointing to where the market will go next.

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Stocks show Fear while corporate bond demand shows Extreme Greed. One of those signals is wrong, and the change could happen quickly.

(learn about all of the benefits here!)

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(4) Interest Rate Forecast & Real Estate Outlook

What’s next for mortgages, housing, and your money.

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Interest Rate Predictions

I posted on X this week what the rate era actually costs people. A $500K mortgage now costs $3,800 a month. In 2021, that same mortgage cost $1,800 a month. That’s $2,000 more each month for the same home.

Freddie Mac’s 30-year average rose to 6.66% this week, up from 6.58% and the highest in nearly a year, while Mortgage News Daily’s lender survey hit 6.85%. The driver was the 10-year Treasury touching 4.71%, pushed up by $100 oil and a Fed that just produced three votes for a hike. Half of Bankrate’s weekly expert panel expects rates to keep rising.

My forecast for the next 3 to 6 months is a range of roughly 6.5% to 7%, with a base case of 6.6% to 6.9%. With Kevin Warsh, you never know. 7% isn’t impossible, and a September hike or further escalation in the Middle East is what gets us there. The only path back toward the low 6s runs through de-escalation, a reopened Strait of Hormuz, and oil giving back its spike.

Some perspective, because I get asked constantly when the good rates come back. The historical average mortgage rate is high. 7.7% is the average rate Americans have paid since 1971. People got too attached to the low COVID-era rates, which probably won’t come back in your lifetime. Only a black swan event can bring back those 3% COVID rates. Plan around that truth instead of waiting for a rerun.

The Housing Market

We’re in a buyer's market. You have more leverage than you think. Ask for the seller to cover closing costs. Ask for a rate buydown. Always ask. If you never ask, the answer will always be no. And you can be very aggressive on any listing over 90 days.

The numbers back this up. Inventory has held above 1.1 million homes for six straight weeks, up 2.7% from a year ago. The median list price is down 2.3% year over year, its 28th consecutive week below year-ago levels. Prices for new homes sank below resale prices for the first time ever, per Bloomberg, and builders sitting on 9.3 months of new-home supply are the most motivated sellers in this market.

Who’s locked out is the clearer story. The homeownership rate held at 65.0%, but ownership among adults under 35 fell to 35.2%. Loans between five and seven years old, the pandemic-rate cohort, now make up 41.2% of all mortgages, roughly double the historical norm. No one I know wants to sell their house with a 3% mortgage to get one with a 7% rate. Would you?

For home buyers, work out the all-in monthly cost at today’s real rates, meaning the 6.85% lenders are quoting, not the number you’re hoping for. Include the mortgage, taxes, insurance, HOA fees, and maintenance. Make sure you can afford that number now, so the refi, if or when it happens, would be a bonus, a gift.

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Part III: Investment Research & Analysis

5. Insider Trading Alerts (Following the Smart Money)

6. My Stock Picks & Research

7. The Smartest Trades I See Right Now

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(5) Insider Trading Alerts (Following the Smart Money)

The latest insider trades from politicians, billionaires, and CEO’s, that are worth paying attention to.

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(learn about all of the benefits here!)

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(6) My Stock Picks & Research

These are the stocks I believe have the strongest long-term growth potential, including what I’m buying now and what I’m watching for a better price entry. (With my research, ratings, and buying plan).

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Six stocks made my list this week.

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(7) The Smartest Trades I See Right Now

Unusual options activity showing where the smart money is placing its biggest bets.

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(learn about all the benefits here!)

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Part IV: Financial Playbook (What To Right Do Now)

8. A Valuable Lesson (People Learn Too Late in Life)

9. My Tips & Actionable Advice

10. You Asked, I Answered

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(8) Valuable Lessons People Learn Too Late in Life

Important lessons most people learn too late in life.

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Way too many people hang on to the past, for way too long.

That is the story of this issue. For about fifteen years money was nearly free, and every plan built on that assumption looked smart (at the time). A homebuyer could stretch because a 3% interest rate kept payments manageable. A company could ask investors to wait years for profits because safer investments paid almost nothing. Then the price of money changed, and most people kept planning as if it hadn’t.

I posted this on X this week:

The 30-year Treasury yield just hit its highest level since 2007, and mortgage rates are now nearing 7%.

A $600,000 mortgage now costs almost $1,500 more each month than it did in 2021.

But nothing about the house became $1,500 better. The financing became $1,500 more expensive. That is what expensive money does. It doesn’t take anything from you directly. It quietly raises the price of everything around you. It raises the price of every plan that only worked when waiting was free.

We watched the same thing happen to stocks in July. Chip stocks had their worst month since 2008 while the S&P 500 sat near its highs, and then Amazon gained 15% because it could point to AWS growing 37% and actually earning money. The market didn’t stop believing in AI. It raised the price of believing without proof.

So the plans that quietly break are the ones that now need luck. A home that only becomes affordable after a refinance is not affordable. A company that needs cheap financing to survive is weaker than its growth story sounds. A portfolio that needs every position to recover quickly isn’t patient, it’s fragile.

I get so many DMs each week from people who are scared about AI. They’re afraid of losing their jobs, they’re afraid of being unable to support their families, they’re afraid of becoming part of what many call the permanent underclass. The fear is understandable. AI is coming for so many jobs, and the world will look totally different 10 years from now, especially 20 years from now. Technological advances compound very quickly. First slowly, then quickly. The people who get hurt will be the ones who assume the last fifteen years will be the same as the next fifteen, and don’t prepare for what’s coming.

Always learn from the past, live for the present, but plan for the future.

In practice that means buying a home only when the full payment works at today’s rate, so a future rate cut is a bonus instead of a rescue. It means owning businesses that connect spending to revenue and cash flow. It means keeping enough cash that a job loss or a repair can’t force you to sell. And it means learning to use AI now, while you still have the time and the leverage to benefit from it rather than absorb it.

Cheap capital is a thing of the past. And most people won’t realize it until it’s too late.

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(9) My Tips & Actionable Advice

My goal is to help you make better decisions with money, investing, and life.

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(10) You Asked, I Answered

Here’s what paid subscribers are asking, and what you need to know too.

Have a question? Leave a comment below and I’ll answer it!

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Q: When are mortgage rates coming back down?

Rates are not coming back down for a very long time. Rates are only coming down for a black swan event. Rates dropping for COVID, the 2008 housing crisis, 9/11 were black swan type events.

Look at that list again, because it’s the honest answer to the question. Every time in recent memory that Americans got cheap mortgages, something had gone badly wrong first, and the Fed was cutting in an emergency rather than because the economy had earned it. The 3% mortgage wasn’t a reward for good behavior. It was the byproduct of a global shutdown, and wishing for its return is closer to wishing for another crisis than most people realize when they say it.

What we have instead is an economy where the Fed just held rates while three of its own officials voted to raise them, and where the 30-year Treasury closed July at its highest level since 2007. My range for the next three to six months is 6.5% to 7%. A September hike or more Middle East trouble pushes it toward the top of that range, and the only honest path lower runs through de-escalation and cheaper oil, not through the Fed deciding to rescue borrowers.

So plan your purchase at today’s rate, and treat a refinance as a bonus that may never arrive. The people who get hurt in this market aren’t the ones who bought at 6.85%. They’re the ones who bought a payment they could only afford if rates fell, and then rates didn’t.

Q: What would make you more bearish on the market?

More damage to bonds would make me bearish. Bonds are the tell.

Credit investors get paid last when a company fails, which means they have every reason to notice trouble before equity investors do. Right now they’re pricing in almost none, with the spread between junk bonds and investment-grade sitting near historic lows, while stock investors are sitting in Fear. Both of those crowds are looking at the same economy. One of them is going to be wrong.

Until that resolves, the level I’m actually watching is 7,313 on the S&P 500. We closed Friday at 7,490, so the market has spent weeks holding that floor while technology fell apart underneath it, and that’s the difference between a rotation and a real problem. A sustained break below it would tell me the selling has spread past tech into everything else.

None of that has happened yet, so the long-term trend stays bullish for now and I stay invested on my schedule. But I’d rather tell you my trigger in advance than explain afterward why I changed my mind, and I will tell you the moment the evidence does.

Q: Should I buy technology stocks after this selloff?

Long term investing is how you build wealth. Ignore the short term market noise.

That’s the frame, and July is a good test of whether you can actually apply it. The month looked like a disaster from the outside, with more than $1 trillion leaving the world’s biggest chip stocks in about a week. Then Samsung warned that memory demand could outrun supply through 2028, and Micron jumped 18% and Sandisk 26% the next day. Anyone who panicked on the way down and anyone who chased on the way up made the same mistake at opposite prices, and the only people who came out clean were the ones whose purchases were already on a schedule.

So keep the long-term purchases automatic and be genuinely selective about anything you buy on top of that. I prefer proven earners and the companies supplying the chips, equipment, power, and construction behind AI, because they get paid regardless of which model wins. Avoid buying anything immediately after a huge rebound, and keep enough cash to buy the next stretch of weakness, which will come. It always does.

The most important number in the decision isn’t the price. It’s your time horizon and whether you could hold that position through a 30% decline without selling, because in this corner of the market you will eventually be asked to.

Q: What should I do if AI starts threatening my job?

Do not wait until your job is threatened. Start learning while you still have time to use the skill, improve it, and show its value. Knowledge compounds.

Prompting matters, but the goal is not to collect clever prompts. The goal is to use AI to become better at work your employer already values.

Apollo’s research may be an early warning. Workers in highly AI-exposed occupations experienced wage growth about 6.7 percentage points below workers in less-exposed occupations after 2023, while the study did not find a statistically significant employment decline. It does not prove that AI caused the full difference, but it suggests the first effect may be slower raises and weaker bargaining power—not an immediate layoff.

Start with the work, not the tool.

List the tasks you repeat every week. Mark the ones that take the most time, create the most errors, or slow down other people. Choose one task and learn how AI can help you complete it faster or better. It could be organizing research, summarizing a long document, drafting a first version, checking a spreadsheet, preparing meeting notes, or turning rough ideas into an outline.

Learn how to prompt by giving the tool a clear objective, the context it needs, the constraints it must follow, and the format you want back. Then improve the prompt after you see where the first result fails. Prompting skills are useful because it helps you direct the work. It is not a replacement for knowing what good work looks like.

Do not hand over the final judgment. Check the facts, numbers, sources, and output yourself. Use only approved tools for confidential information, and never paste sensitive company or client data into a system your employer has not approved.

The valuable person is not the one who trusts every AI answer. It is the one who can use the tool, catch the mistakes, and take responsibility for the result.

Measure what changed. Track the hours saved, errors reduced, work completed, costs avoided, or revenue supported. “I know how to use AI” is a weak career claim. “I reduced a five-hour weekly process to two hours while keeping a human review” gives a manager a business reason to care. Always quantify things. It will make you look more valuable.

Turn the result into proof. Save the workflow, build examples you are allowed to share, add the outcome to your resume, and teach the process to someone else. Teaching it moves you from using a tool to improving how a team works. This is key.

Prompting alone will not protect a career forever. Prompts will become easier and more common as time passes. Your stronger advantage is combining AI with knowledge of your industry, sound judgment, communication, relationships, and responsibility for the final decision.

Build financial and career insurance before you need it. Keep an emergency fund, update your resume, stay in touch with people in your field, and identify nearby roles that value the experience you already have. Those steps give you time to make a good decision if your job changes.

This week, choose one recurring task, improve it with AI, and record the result. That is more valuable than spending another week worrying about a future you cannot control.

AI won’t take your job. Someone using AI will.

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Have another question? Leave a comment below and I’ll answer it!

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👋Final Words:

Thanks for reading and joining 113,000 subscribers who trust our newsletter to get smarter with money. My goal is simple: to help you build wealth, make better decisions, and protect your future.

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